Part 6

Of these three pieces, the first has been absolutely denied to Shakspeare; and it is, in my opinion, equally difficult to believe that it is entirely his composition, and that the admirable scene between Talbot and his son does not bear the impress of his hand. Two old dramas, printed in 1600, contain the plan, and even numerous details of the second and third parts of "Henry VI." These two original works were long attributed to our poet, as a first essay which he afterward perfected. But this opinion will not bear an attentive examination; and all the probabilities, both literary and historical, unite in granting to Shakspeare, in the last two parts of "Henry VI.," no other share than that of a more important and extensive remodeling than he was able to bestow upon other works submitted to his correction. Brilliant developments, imagery conceived with taste and followed up with skill, and a lofty, animated, and picturesque style, are the characteristics which distinguish the great poet's work from the primitive production which he had merely beautified with his magnificent coloring. {70} As regards their plan and arrangement, the original pieces have undergone no change; and even after the composition of the three parts of "Henry VI.," Shakspeare might still speak of the "Venus and Adonis" as the "first heir of his invention."

But when will this invention finally display itself in all its freedom? When will Shakspeare walk alone on that stage on which he is to achieve such mighty progress? Some of his biographers place the "Comedy of Errors," and "Love's Labor Lost"--the first two works the honors and criticisms of which he has to share with no one--before "Henry VI." in order of time. In this unimportant discussion, one fact alone is certain, and becomes a new subject of surprise. The first dramatic work which the imagination of Shakspeare truly produced was a comedy; and this comedy will be followed by others: he has at last taken wing, but not as yet toward the realms of tragedy. Corneille also began with comedy, but he was then ignorant of his own powers, and almost ignorant of the drama. The familiar scenes of life had alone presented themselves to his thoughts; and the scenes of his comedies are laid in his native town, in the Galerie du Palais and in the Place Royale. His subjects are timidly borrowed from surrounding circumstances; he has not yet risen above himself, or transcended his limited sphere; his vision has not yet penetrated into those ideal regions in which his imagination will one day roam at will. But Shakspeare is already a poet; imitation no longer trammels his progress; and his conceptions are no longer formed exclusively within the world of his habits. How was it that the frivolous spirit of comedy was his first guide in that poetic world from which he drew his inspiration? {71} Why did not the emotions of tragedy first awaken the powers of so eminently tragic a poet? Was it this circumstance which led Johnson to give this singular opinion: "Shakspeare's tragedy seems to be skill; his comedy to be instinct?"

Assuredly, nothing can be more whimsical than to refuse to Shakspeare the instinct of tragedy; and if Johnson had had any feeling of it himself, such an idea would never have entered his mind. The fact which I have just stated, however, is not open to doubt; it is well deserving of explanation, and has its causes in the very nature of comedy, as it was understood and treated by Shakspeare.

Shakspeare's comedy is not, in fact, the comedy of Molière; nor is it that of Aristophanes, or of the Latin poets. Among the Greeks, and in France, in modern times, comedy was the offspring of a free but attentive observation of the real world, and its object was to bring its features on the stage. The distinction between the tragic and the comic styles is met with almost in the cradle of dramatic art, and their separation has always become more distinctly marked during the course of their progress. The principle of this distinction is contained in the very nature of things. The destiny and nature of man, his passions and affairs, characters and events--all things within and around us--have their serious and their amusing sides, and may be considered and described under either of these points of view. This two-fold aspect of man and the world has opened to dramatic poetry two careers naturally distinct; but in dividing its powers to traverse them both, art has neither separated itself from realities, nor ceased to observe and reproduce them. {72} Whether Aristophanes attacks, with the most fantastic liberty of imagination, the vices or follies of the Athenians; or whether Molière depicts the absurdities of credulity and avarice, of jealousy and pedantry, and ridicules the frivolity of courts, the vanity of citizens, and even the affectation of virtues, it matters little that there is a difference between the subjects in the delineation of which the two poets have employed their powers; it matters little that one brought public life and the whole nation on the stage, while the other merely described incidents of private life, the interior arrangements of families, and the nonsensicality of individual characters; this difference in the materials of comedy arises from the difference of time, place, and state of civilization. But in both Aristophanes and Molière realities always constitute the substance of the picture. The manners and ideas of their times, the vices and follies of their fellow-citizens--in a word, the nature and life of man--are always the stimulus and nutriment of their poetic vein. Comedy thus takes its origin in the world which surrounds the poet, and is connected, much more closely than tragedy, with external and real facts.

The Greeks, whose mind and civilization followed so regular a course in their development, did not combine the two kinds of composition, and the distinction which separates them in nature was maintained without effort in art. Simplicity prevailed among this people; society was not abandoned by them to a state of conflict and incoherence; and their destiny did not pass away in protracted obscurity, in the midst of contrasts, and a prey to dark and deep uneasiness. They grew and shone in their land just as the sun rose and pursued its course through the skies which overshadowed them. National perils, intestine discord, and civil wars agitated the life of a man in those days, without disturbing his imagination, and without opposing or deranging the natural and easy course of his thoughts. {73} The reflex influence of this general harmony was diffused over literature and the arts. Styles of composition spontaneously became distinguished from each other, according to the principles upon which they depended and the impressions which they aspired to produce. The sculptor chiseled, isolated statues or innumerous groups, and did not aim at composing violent scenes or vast pictures out of blocks of marble. Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides undertook to excite the people by the narration of the mighty destinies of heroes and of kings. Cratinus and Aristophanes aimed at diverting them by the representation of the absurdities of their contemporaries or of their own follies. These natural classifications corresponded with the entire system of social order, with the state of the minds of the age, and with the instincts of public taste--which would have been shocked at their violation, which desired to yield itself without uncertainty or participation to a single impression or a single pleasure, and which would have rejected all those unnatural mixtures and uncongenial combinations to which their attention had never been called or their judgment accustomed. Thus every art and every style received its free and isolated development within the limits of its proper mission. Thus tragedy and comedy shared man and the world between them, each taking a different domain in the region of realities, and coming by turns to offer to the serious or mirthful consideration of a people who invariably insisted upon simplicity and harmony, the poetic effects which their skill could derive from the materials placed in their hands.

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In our modern world, all things have borne another character. Order, regularity, natural and easy development, seem to have been banished from it. Immense interests, admirable ideas, sublime sentiments, have been thrown, as it were, pell-mell with brutal passions, coarse necessities, and vulgar habits. Obscurity, agitation, and disturbance have reigned in minds as well as in states. Nations have been formed, not of freemen and slaves, but of a confused mixture of diverse, complicated classes, ever engaged in conflict and labor; a violent chaos, which civilization, after long-continued efforts, has not yet succeeded in reducing to complete harmony. Social conditions, separated by power, but united in a common barbarism of manners; the germ of loftiest moral truths fermenting in the midst of absurd ignorance; great virtues applied in opposition to all reason; shameful vices maintained and defended with hauteur; an indocile honor, ignorant of the simplest delicacies of honesty; boundless servility, accompanied by measureless pride; in fine, the incoherent assemblage of all that human nature and destiny contain of that which is great and little, noble and trivial, serious and puerile, strong and wretched--this is what man and society have been in our Europe; this is the spectacle which has appeared on the theatre of the world.

In such a state of mind and things, how was it possible for a clear distinction and simple classification of styles and arts to be effected? How could tragedy and comedy have presented and formed themselves isolatedly in literature, when, in reality, they were incessantly in contact, entwined in the same facts, and intermingled in the same actions, so thoroughly, that it was sometimes difficult to discern the moment of passage from one to the other. Neither the rational principle, nor the delicate feeling which separate them, could attain any development in minds which were incapacitated from apprehending them by the disorder and rapidity of different or opposite impressions. {75} Was it proposed to bring upon the stage the habitual occurrences of ordinary life? Taste was as easily satisfied as manners. Those religious performances which were the origin of the European theatre, had not escaped this admixture. Christianity is a popular religion; into the abyss of terrestrial miseries, its divine founder came in search of men, to draw them to himself; its early history is a history of poor, sick, and feeble men; it existed at first for a long while in obscurity, and afterward in the midst of persecutions, despised and proscribed by turns, and exposed to all the vicissitudes and efforts of a humble and violent destiny. Uncultivated imaginations easily seized upon the triviality which might be intermingled with the incidents of this history; the Gospel, the acts of martyrs, and the lives of saints, would have struck them much less powerfully if they had seen only their tragic aspect or their rational truths. The first Mysteries brought simultaneously upon the stage the emotions of religious terror and tenderness, and the buffooneries of vulgar comicality; and thus, in the very cradle of dramatic poetry, tragedy and comedy contracted that alliance which was inevitably forced upon them by the general condition of nations and of minds.

In France, however, this alliance was speedily broken off. From causes which are connected with the entire history of our civilization, the French people have always taken extreme pleasure in drollery. Of this, our literature has from time to time given evidence. This craving for gayety, and for gayety without alloy, early supplied the inferior classes of our countrymen with their comic farces, into which nothing was admitted that had not a tendency to excite laughter. {76} In the infancy of the art, comedy in France may very possibly have invaded the domain of tragedy, but tragedy had no right to the field which comedy had reserved to itself; and in the _piteous_ Moralities and _pompous_ Tragedies which princes caused to be represented in their palaces, and rectors in their colleges, the trivially comic element long retained a place which was inexorably refused to the tragic element in the buffooneries with which the people were amused. We may therefore affirm that in France comedy, in an imperfect but distinct form, was created before tragedy. At a later period, the rigorous separation of classes, the absence of popular institutions, the regular action of the supreme power, the establishment of a more exact and uniform system of public order than existed in any other country, the habits and influence of the court, and a variety of other causes, disposed the popular mind to maintain that strict distinction between the two styles which was ordained by the classical authorities, who held undisputed sway over our drama. Then arose among us true and great comedy, as conceived by Molière; and as it was in accordance with our manners, as well as with the rules of the art, to strike out a new path--as, while adapting itself to the precepts of antiquity, it did not fail to derive its subjects and coloring from the facts and personages of the surrounding world, our comedy suddenly rose to a pitch of perfection which, in my opinion, has never been attained by any other country in any other age. To place himself in the interior of families, and thereby to gain the immense advantage of a variety of ideas and conditions, which extends the domain of art without injuring the simplicity of the effects which it produces; to find in man passions sufficiently strong, and caprices sufficiently powerful to sway his whole destiny, and yet to limit their influence to the suggestion of those errors which may make man ridiculous, without ever touching upon those which would render him miserable; {77} to describe an individual as laboring under that excess of preoccupation which, diverting him from all other thoughts, abandons him entirely to the guidance of the idea which possesses him, and yet to throw in his way only those interests which are sufficiently frivolous to enable him to compromise them without danger; to depict, in "Tartuffe," the threatening knavery of the hypocrite, and the dangerous imbecility of the dupe, in such a manner as merely to divert the spectator, without incurring any of the odious consequences of such a position; to give a comic character, in the "Misanthrope," to those feelings which do most honor to the human race, by condemning them to confinement within the dimensions of the existence of a courtier; and thus to reach the amusing by means of the serious; to extract food for mirth from the inmost recesses of human nature, and incessantly to maintain the character of comedy while bordering upon the confines of tragedy--this is what Molière has done, this is the difficult and original style which he bestowed upon France; and France alone, in my opinion, could have given dramatic art this tendency, and Molière.

Nothing of this kind took place among the English. The asylum of German manners, as well as of German liberties, England pursued, without obstacle, the irregular, but natural course of the civilization which such elements could not fail to engender. It retained their disorder as well as their energy, and, until the middle of the seventeenth century, its literature, as well as its institutions, was the sincere expression of these qualities. When the English drama attempted to reproduce the poetic image of the world, tragedy and comedy were not separated. {78} The predominance of the popular taste sometimes carried tragic representations to a pitch of atrocity which was unknown in France, even in the rudest essays of dramatic art; and the influence of the clergy, by purging the comic stage of that excessive immorality which it exhibited elsewhere, also deprived it of that malicious and sustained gayety which constitutes the essence of true comedy. The habits of mind which were entertained among the people by the minstrels and their ballads, allowed the introduction, even into those compositions which were most exclusively devoted to mirthfulness, of some touches of those emotions which comedy in France can never admit with out losing its name, and becoming melodrama. Among truly national works, the only thoroughly comic play which the English stage possessed before the time of Shakspeare, "Gammer Grurton's Needle," was composed for a college, and modeled in accordance with the classic rules. The vague titles given to dramatic works, such as _play, interlude, history,_ or even _ballad_, scarcely ever indicate any distinction of style. Thus, between that which was called _tragedy_ and that which was sometimes named _comedy_, the only essential difference consisted in the _denouement_, according to the principles laid down in the fifteenth century by the monk Lydgate, who "defines a comedy to begin with complaint and to end with gladness, whereas tragedy begins in prosperity and ends in adversity."

Thus, at the advent of Shakspeare, the nature and destiny of man, which constitute the materials of dramatic poetry, were not divided or classified into different branches of art. When art desired to introduce them on the stage, it accepted them in their entirety, with all the mixtures and contrasts which they present to observation; nor was the public taste inclined to complain of this. {79} The comic portion of human realities had a right to take its place wherever its presence was demanded or permitted by truth; and such was the character of civilization, that tragedy, by admitting the comic element, did not derogate from truth in the slightest degree. In such a condition of the stage and of the public mind, what could be the state of comedy, properly so called? How could it be permitted to claim to bear a particular name, and to form a distinct style? It succeeded in this attempt by boldly leaving those realities in which its natural domain was neither respected nor acknowledged; it did not limit its efforts to the delineation of settled manners or of consistent characters; it did not propose to itself to represent men and things under a ridiculous but truthful aspect; but it became a fantastic and romantic work, the refuge of those amusing improbabilities which, in its idleness or folly, the imagination delights to connect together by a slight thread, in order to form from them combinations capable of affording diversion or interest, without calling for the judgment of the reason. Graceful pictures, surprises, the curiosity which attaches to the progress of an intrigue, mistakes, quid-pro-quos, all the witticisms of parody and travestie, formed the substance of this inconsequent diversion. The conformation of the Spanish plays, a taste for which was beginning to prevail in England, supplied these gambols of the imagination with abundant frame-works and alluring models. Next to their chronicles and ballads, collections of French or Italian tales, together with the romances of chivalry, formed the favorite reading of the people. Is it strange that so productive a mine and so easy a style should first have attracted the attention of Shakspeare? Can we feel astonished that his young and brilliant imagination hastened to wander at will among such subjects, free from the yoke of probabilities, and excused from seeking after serious and vigorous combinations? {80} The great poet, whose mind and hand proceeded, it is said, with such equal rapidity that his manuscript scarcely contained a single erasure, doubtless yielded with delight to those unrestrained gambols in which he could display without labor his rich and varied faculties. He could put any thing he pleased into his comedies, and he has, in fact, put every thing into them, with the exception of one thing which was incompatible with such a system, namely, the ensemble which, making every part concur toward the same end, reveals at every step the depth of the plan and the grandeur of the work. It would be difficult to find in Shakspeare's tragedies a single conception, position, act, or passion, or degree of vice or virtue, which may not also be met with in some one of his comedies; but that which in his tragedies is carefully thought out, fruitful in result, and intimately connected with the series of causes and effects, is in his comedies only just indicated, and offered to our sight for a moment to dazzle us with a passing gleam, and soon to disappear in a new combination. In "Measure for Measure," Angelo, the unworthy governor of Vienna, after having condemned Claudio to death for the crime of having seduced a young girl whom he intended to marry, himself attempts to seduce Isabella, the sister of Claudio, by promising her brother's pardon as a recompense for her own dishonor; and when, by Isabella's address in substituting another girl in her place, he thinks he has received the price of his infamous bargain, he gives orders to hasten Claudio's execution. Is not this tragedy? Such a fact might well be placed in the life of Richard the Third, and no crime of Macbeth's presents this excess of wickedness. {81} But in "Macbeth" and "Richard III.," crime produces the tragic effect which belongs to it, because it bears the impress of probability, and because real forms and colors attest its presence: we can discern the place which it occupies in the heart of which it has taken possession: we know how it gained admission, what it has conquered, and what remains for it to subjugate: we behold it incorporating itself by degrees into the unhappy being whom it has subdued: we see it living, walking, and breathing with a man who lives, walks, and breathes, and thus communicates to it his character, his own individuality. In Angelo, crime is only a vague abstraction, connected _en passant_ with a proper name, with no other motive than the necessity of making that person commit a certain action which shall produce a certain position, from which the poet intends to derive certain effects. Angelo is not presented to us at the outset either as a rascal or as a hypocrite; on the contrary, he is a man of exaggeratedly severe virtue. But the progress of the poem requires that he should become criminal, and criminal he becomes; when his crime is committed, he will repent of it as soon as the poet pleases, and will find himself able to resume without effort the natural course of his life, which had been interrupted only for a moment.